Headway

WGU/WGU Labs

3.12.26

R

BUILDERS · Stranded Talent

Rosa

"The Expert Nobody's Validated Yet"

"I have been teaching children to read for fifteen years. I just don't have a piece of paper that says so."

BACKGROUND

Has been in the same elementary school classroom for 14 years. Manages instruction independently, mentors new hires, is the person colleagues come to when things go sideways. Her expertise is visible to everyone around her. The institution just has no way to record it.

AT A GLANCE

Income

$31,000

Experience

15 years

Prior College

1 yr, no credential

Language

Spanish primary

GOALS

1

Earn a BA and move into a lead teacher role

2

Have 15 years of classroom experience formally recognized, not ignored

FRICTION POINTS

Prior learning assessment is opaque — she can't advocate for herself within it

Programs treat her as if she's starting from zero

Academic writing in English is a real barrier — she knows the content

Financial aid doesn't cover enough for someone who can't reduce hours

Headway

Problem

In the current talent marketplace, people are defined and valued based on their achievements, degrees, and social capital earned over time, yet the skills gained through informal life experiences, current life circumstances, and the context surrounding them are not a formal part of their record and don’t factor into the overall career trajectory decision-making. We have crafted a tool that leverages memory from user input and artifact sharing (ie. from a digital wallet that holds credentials, skills, portfolio items) that has been compiled over time through informal coaching engagements to help create a more accurate picture of next steps for our persona, Rosa. Rosa can now take this memory and knowledge of herself with her as she continues her career and other important lived inflection points.

Key Functions

Stretch Goals

• Deploy to AWS using Amplify
• Storage with a Bedrock and agents with AgentCore
• Local context (for community news and events, career and education pathways)
• Export memory as a VC to share with other memory tools in the future
• Use APIs to push and pull skills data to the users’ digital wallet and other career navigation tools
• Confidence scale based on AI next step recommendations
• Modeling the AI tool after conclusions based on research done on effective mentoring and tutoring

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Questions

• Can AI provide more insight into incremental occupational steps given a person’s life circumstances?
• Is there a point where AI can’t be of assistance, where life circumstances are too complex?
• Is there a reality where judicious forgetting is appropriate? When do you begin discounting life history?

• Organizes and structures relevant life information
• Provides this information to the AI tool in a structured way for queries to find patterns
• Workflow to guide them through the memory that has been stored]
• Export knowledge graph to a document to be used in other AI apps

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